How to make Commodore 64 graphics in Photoshop

March 5, 2016

Trying to make some retro pixel graphics to look exactly like they did back in the old Commodore 64 days? It’s easy! The secret is the double-squared pixels together with commodore 64 color table. Let’s get on with it!

Part 1: Commodore 64 color table

First of all we need to define the correct color table of the Commodore computer. Obviously we couldn’t be using colors the C64 was (is) unable to display. It had 16 pre-defined colors available. This is one of the reasons why many if its games had quite similar graphics.

If you wish to make your own color table you can use some C64 screen dumps to extract the colors. It is important they come from the same source, as you want the colors to be absolutely identical. The screen dumps you extract from must be in 320×200 pixels, GIF or PNG format, as you don’t want JPEG and interpolation noise.

You can find lots of game screen dumps at lemon64.com. It is important that all the colors are represented in the same screen. A good example is the game ‘Creatures’ looking like this:

1. Copy the image and paste in a new Photoshop document.

2. Merge layers [ctrl/cmd + e].

3. In menu choose [Image > Mode > Color table…]

4. Click [Save] and save the file as Commodore64.act on your desktop.

Part 2: Scale your image

Now you need to find the image you wish to use for the conversion. I found an image of a nice UFO house which I’ll be using.

Part 3: Adding the Commodore 64 color palette

Choose [Dither: Diffusion 8%]. A high dither number will make the image look too perfect. Almost every images on the Commodore 64 was hand-drawn (with joystick or keyboard) and dithering nearly impossible.

8. This is what your image should look like:

Part 4: Scale back up

10. Voilà! You’re done. Your image should look like the one below. You can experiment with different scaling percentages depending on the purpose of your image. If you use a high-res image, you might want larger pixels. Remember that you should try to end up with the right amount of pixels in order to keep the effect realistic.

Christoffer Helgelin Hald

Christoffer Helgelin Hald is a digital designer from Copenhagen. He loves technology, typography and well-thought and minimalistic design. He is a die-hard retro gamer and started coding on a Commodore 64. He is also a barefoot runner, carbon cycling enthusiast, introvert, cat person, Google fanatic, LCHF-cultist and hophead homebrewer at Køkkenöl. He is 39 years old and works at design agency Re‑public in Copenhagen. Fridays are his favorite days of the week. Fire up that Cure album and try to figure out what bars have the most craft beers and the least people.